The ROI Panel discusses the news from Paris and what it means for investors.

COP21 | Impact Alpha's ROI

In 2012, the F.B. Heron Foundation made waves by setting a goal to mission-align 100% of it's $300 million in assets by 2017. 

Now, in "Building a Foundation for the 21st Century," Clara Miller - president of Heron - has called for the rest of the field to follow suit.

This week on ROI we're featuring an interview with Clara. 

Clara Miller - All In For Impact | Impact Alpha's ROI

David chats with Emily Stone, CEO and Co-Founder of Uncommon Cacao, about her experience as a social entrepreneur.

Emily Stone | Impact Alpha's ROI

What will a Clinton Presidency mean for Impact Investing?

Madam President and the Impact Economy

Risk. Is it a board game focused on world domination, a fundamental consideration when allocating capital, or both? We focus on the latter this week, and explore how the impact community approaches issues surrounding risk and opportunity.

Risk and Impact

TPG Capital is moving into the impact world in a big way with a new 2 billion dollar fund. Bono, the famous face of the new fund, turned heads with some controversial comments at The Skoll World Forum. Are the impact investors of the past big hippies who aren't real investors? Is TPG about to change the game?

Get the Hippies Out of Impact?

Back in 2015, U.N. leaders adopted a set of 17 targets describing what the world should look like in 2030. The goals are highly ambitious, calling for solutions to climate change and poverty, as well as huge conservation targets and a revamping of the global agricultural system. A lot has happened on the geopolitical stage in the past years, but the SDGs, as they're called (to Imogen's chagrin), are still on the table. Has progress been made? Find out on this episode of Returns on Investment.

Unpacking the Sustainable Development Goals

On this special edition of Returns on Investment, we're featuring a panel discussion from The Liquidnet for Good 10 Year Anniversary Forum. The conversation focuses on the future of business as a force for good, and is moderated by Daryl Brewster, the CEO of CECP

It features insights from Cammie Erickson, a Senior Manager with Linkedin For Good, Jen Field, the Social Impact Director for GLG, and Andy Fyfe of B Lab.

The Future of Business as a Force for Good

Uber is reeling due to a series of damning reports about it's corporate culture of misogyny. One potential solution that makes impact investors ears perk up: diversify the board. But, a new study from Katherine Klein of the Wharton School suggests that "the relationship between board gender diversity and company performance is either non-exist (effectively zero) or weakly positive." How do the findings effect the conversation around gender lens investing?

What's the Value of Gender Diversity, Anyway?

On this episode of ROI, David Bank chats with Morgan Simon of the Candide Group about her new book "Real Impact: The New Economics of Social Change."

A Conversation with Morgan Simon

On this episode of ROI, David Bank chats with technologist and entrepreneur Tim O'Reilly about his new book WTF: What's the Future, and Why It's Up to Us.

WTF: An Interview With Tim O'Reilly

The obsession with financial returns that for decades kept major institutional investors away is now pushing them towards a serious accounting of environmental risks.

Ashby Monk joins Dave Chen, the chair of Equilibrium Capital, and David Bank, editor of Impact Alpha, on this episode of Returns on Investment: Institutional Shift.

Institutional Shift: Long-term asset owners move to future-proof their portfolios

The latest Returns on Investment podcast takes up the case of the $1 billion Abraaj Growth Markets Health Fund and impact investing failures more broadly. The health fund, which was pursuing an ambitious effort to build comprehensive healthcare networks in the megacities of the 21st century – think Lagos and Karachi and Mumbai – is now embroiled in the larger scandal that has engulfed Abraaj Group.

Will Abraaj’s ambitious global health strategy survive the scandal?

The three-letter acronym for “environmental, social and governance” has broken out from the wonky world of finance and into subway ads and online pitches for a slew of new ESG mutual funds, ETFs and other financial services. 

How such “non-financial” factors affect financial performance has been a matter of hot debate for several years. As ESG breaks into the mainstream, the podcast’s roundtable regulars took on a tougher question is: Does it make a bit of difference in the real world?

If ‘ESG Investing’ is So Great, Why is the World Going to Hell?

Are newspapers and newsmagazines "impact investments"? And are the billionaires who buy them making a positive impact? Listen in as David, Imogen, and Brian take up the topic of impact investing in news media on the latest episode of ROI

Is it Impact Investing When Billionaires Buy Newspapers and Magazines?

The dramatic fall from grace of Bill McGlashan, co-founder and former CEO of TPG Growth and The Rise Fund, after being indicted in the Varsity Blues college-admissions scandal, Rose-Smith suggests, may say more about private-equity and alternative-investment asset management in general than about impact investing in particular.

The ‘Red Ferrari Syndrome’ and Other Lessons of Impact Investing’s Varsity Blues Scandal

In a new series of podcasts produced in collaboration with Omidyar Network, ImpactAlpha asked a range of investors, from fully “market-rate,” to unapologetically concessionary, what lies… Beyond Tradeoffs.

What we heard is that investors of all types are finding strategies to avoid specific and systemic risks, to be aligned with long-term trends, to generate tangible and measureable social and environmental benefits and to otherwise meet their objectives – all along the continuum of risks and returns.

Beyond Tradeoffs: Omidyar Network's Investments Across the Continuum of Returns

A changing climate is changing the climate inside one of the world’s largest asset managers. Clients of Goldman Sachs Assets Management, which manages assets on behalf of wealthy families, pensions and foundations, endowments and insurance companies. These parties have always expected the firm to recite key financial metrics about the companies they own. But increasingly, says Hugh Lawson, the head of ESG and impact investing at Goldman, clients are demanding the big Wall Street money manager know more about the qualitative aspects of what those businesses do and how they do it.

In the latest episode of ImpactAlpha’s Returns on Investment podcast, David Bank dug in with Lawson about how greater investor urgency around climate, and confidence in low-carbon investment strategies, is changing investing (or isn’t).

Goldman Sachs’ Hugh Lawson on How Climate Change Is Changing Asset Management

Updated Corporate Purpose Signals Broader Definitions of Fiduciary Duty and Materiality

The popular protests that drove the GSG Impact Summit out of Santiago, Chile, added “a poignant urgency” to the first day of the global gathering of impact investors in Buenos Aires, Sir Ronald Cohen said in a podcast interview with ImpactAlpha’s David Bank.

Sir Ronald Cohen: ‘We are overthrowing the dictatorship of profit’

How impact investing will fare in the inevitable event of the next economic downturn is the topic of the most recent instalment of ImpactAlpha’s podcast Returns on Investment. Roundtable regulars Brian Walsh, David Bank and your “loveable curmudgeon” all agree that a slowdown, and possibly even a crash, is inevitable in the not-so-distant future.

Will Impact Investing Be Swimming Naked When the Tide Goes Out?

“Global thematic impact didn’t exist, so we decided to build it ourselves," says Erika Karp in the latest ROI. Cornerstone’s Access Impact Fund is a Nasdaq-listed mutual fund that for a minimum $1,000 investment offers access to sub-advisors looking for thematic investments in small-, medium- and large-cap companies across geographies.

Karp, formerly the head of global sector research at UBS Investment Bank, is taking a stand on hotly debated investment topics that go beyond impact investing. She says active management, which has fallen out of favor because of high fees and uneven performance, is key to intentional impact.

Cornerstone Capital Seeks to Prove Active Managers Can Deliver Impact in Public Equities

The Decapitalization of the Fossil Fuel Industry

“The positive news is that more and more people know what we are talking about,” Bertrand Badré says on the most recent ImpactAlpha podcast. “The negative news is there is not enough action.” The former World Bank official and founder of Blue like an Orange Sustainable Capital (the name comes from a French surrealist poem) says needed changes in the financial system were not given enough thought when the Sustainable Development Goals were adopted five years ago. He’s writing a book on the topic; as a down payment, Blue Orange is releasing at Davos its internal rating system, SDG Blue, which scores investments against the SDGs in much the same way Moody’s scores companies’ credit ratings.

Blue like an Orange offers a report card for the Sustainable Development Goals

On the latest edition of ImpactAlpha’s Returns on Investment podcast, host Brian Walsh suggests that the ‘technology’ of ESG and impact investing has passed the early-adopter stage and entered the early majority, gaining momentum among companies, asset managers and banks.

‘ESG investing’ crosses the chasm from early adopter to early majority. So what?

Dave Chen of Equilibrium Capital joins David Bank to make bold predictions for 2020 on another episode of our special series: Institutional Shift.

Institutional Shift: Calling the inflection point, and other trends to watch in 2020

Your impact briefing for February 21st, featuring the week's headlines, Agents of Impact, and new info on off-grid electricity in Africa.

Impact Briefing for February 21st

The headlines, a new handbook aims to help scale up the amount of impact capital, and Dennis profiles Tynesia Boyea-Robinson.

Returns on Investment

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